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From International Socialism, No.16, Spring 1964, pp.2-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Only a few months ago the former British colonies on the East African mainland could be cautiously welcomed by experts and publicists as models of constitutional advancement. Here, if nowhere else in Africa’s tempestuous climate, there might lie a stable isothermal front of temperate passions and equilibrated politics, exempt from the fierce tropical outbreaks of schism and repression that struck the sweltering zones over to the West. Balanced between the claims of factional and tribal rivalries, hospitable alike to domestic militancy, Continental nationalism and Great-Power aid, the East African leadership seemed to offer some prospect of a safely evolving equipoise in which fanatical influences would generally mellow into a Fabian outcome. Kenyatta and Nyerere had apparently learnt from the metropolitan tradition of absorbing opposition by using the glad hand rather than crushing it with the mailed fist: pan-African gatherings, pacifist contingents, Oxfam, Mau Mau, repentant settlers and radical educationalists, all were welcome. Plural political systems or (as with Tanganyika) a single-front regime that sounded relatively empirical and modest were the order of the day. This dream has now been brutally shattered. In late January, the power of all three governments survived solely through the convergence of British armed detachments upon their own mutinous soldiery. Arrests of army and trade-union rank-and-file have followed. The social structure of East Africa is revealed to be as perilously fissile as that of the Congo after independence. The socialist movement in this country must condemn without qualification the dispatch of British forces to quell this revolt, even upon the request of the nationalist governments concerned. It is shameful that the London Area AGM of the Movement for Colonial Freedom dragged its feet upon this clear-cut issue, as the national body did last year over Jagan’s use of the imperialist military in British Guiana.
At the same time, nobody should be misled into supposing that the mutiny of the ranks in East Africa was anything like a progressive movement. While it has its radical and anti-imperialist aspect, the demand of ‘Africanisation’, whether of the army, the Civil Service or the educational system, has in itself no social content, and within the present emergent societies is all too likely to help consolidate the hold of a native ruling elite over the workers. A fully progressive impetus could be provided to such a slogan only by the leadership of a mass movement aimed towards the control of society by the working masses and based in the first instance upon the independent organisation in struggle of the urban workers. This is of course absent in East Africa, not only because of the given level of economic development, but also because of the adoption by the new leadership of the familiar nationalist tactics of regimenting the trade unions into the ruling Front. Faced with a profound internal crisis, East African nationalism had no better ally than its old overlord in Whitehall. It remains to define our assessment of the events in Zanzibar which precipitated the mutinies. While the reports are confused, and in this country clouded by imperialist venom and hysteria, it seems evident that a majority-based popular uprising has taken place with the participation of diverse social layers ranging from the militant working class to the ambiguous NCO corps. Prophecies that Zanzibar is to be ‘the African Cuba’, are doubtless premature; it is our duty to keep an open but vigilant attitude towards the evolution of this (or of any other) post-colonial regime. As a blow against the colonial and despotic past, we welcome the Zanzibar rising and the new government. But our welcome even at the outset must sound a warning note; the last few years have seen too many ‘revolutionary’ brasshats and bureaucrats fastening upon the backwardness of Africa for us to enthuse naively over the first Cabinet that follows the old order. To notch up as a socialist gain or to write off in advance as a bureaucratic loss – these are alike the easy options of an isolated Left. The fusion of solidarity with vigilance is a more demanding task, to which this journal will continue to address itself.
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